SustainableWork

I believe economic development means helping create opportunities.

Inventor and Entrepreneur Clubs are a really fun way to discuss and learn about opportunities for starting and growing enterprises of all kinds.

We have ours in Iowa County typically on the fourth Monday evening of each month. People get together to discuss, ask questions, and share strategies about entrepreneurship and doing enterprise. It's really fun to see new and old friends interact and help one another with business and startup ideas.

Each month different speakers focus on specific topics. In next week's meeting we'll have Maria Davis from one of our great local foods group REAP, and Lois Federman from her wonderful program Something Special From Wisconsin. Mark will speak directly to growers interested in producing vegetables for the Highland processing and freezing plant. I'll get to cover the possibilities for food entrepreneurship and business expansion available through our new Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen. Looks like a landscape of great opportunities to me.

Here is our press release for our next Iowa County Entrepreneur Club meeting. You can download a PDF version at the end.


Iowa County Entrepreneur Club meeting to focus on growing businesses and creating jobs in local foods and regional food processing.

Dodgeville, WI –

Start or grow your own business around the growing possibilities of local foods and regional food processing!

Local foods and regional food enterprises are blooming everywhere. This is becoming a great way to start or grow businesses in Southwest Wisconsin.

Join us at our next Entrepreneur Club meeting Wed., Feb. 24 in Dodgeville, WI. This meeting will specifically focus on the strong possibilities for food and agricultural entrepreneurship in our region, with four featured speakers:

Maria Davis from the REAP Food Group (Research, Education,
Action, and Policy) will discuss 'Buy Fresh Buy Local Southwest
Wisconsin' and the demand for local foods.

Lois Federman from Something Special From Wisconsin will
discuss the possibilities for working with farmers markets,
produce auctions, and Community Supported Agriculture
(CSA) programs.

Mark Olson from Renaissance Farm will discuss plans for the
Individual Quick Frozen (IQF) vegetable processing and
freezing facility planned for Highland. This section is meant to
give regional growers as much information as is available so
they can plan future farm activities with this facility in mind.

Rick Terrien from Iowa County Area Economic Development will
discuss business support available for area growers and farm-based
entrepreneurs. Rick will also discuss business startup and
expansion possibilities at the new community-access Wisconsin Innovation
Kitchen, a state-certified food processing facility available to growers and
food entrepreneurs, operated by the Hodan Center in Mineral Point.

Grow your own business around the growing possibilities of local foods and regional food processing!

Please join us for a great evening of information sharing at our next Iowa County Entrepreneur Club meeting on Wednesday, Feb. 24. There will be a social hour beginning at 5:30 and the meeting will begin at 6 PM. The location is at the Stonefield Apartments, 407 E. Madison St., Dodgeville WI. The event is free to the public. Bring a friend!

Download more information, agendas, location maps and much more at http://www.iowacountyedc.org.5100b.html

Networking among attendees will be encouraged in the evening's program. "Our goal is to grow the network of entrepreneurs and those that support them in the Iowa County area" said Rick Terrien, Executive Director of ICAEDC.

The Iowa County Area Entrepreneurs Club is an informational forum where entrepreneurs, inventors, existing businesses, new businesses and people thinking about starting their own businesses can come together to encourage each other and share challenges and encouragement. The group meets on a monthly basis, usually the fourth Wednesday of the month. More information about the group is available on the ICAEDC website at www.iowacountyedc.org/5100b.html or by emailing info@iowacountyedc.org

Download a meeting flyer for this meeting focusing on growing vegetables for the proposed Highland processing and freezing facility:
http://www.iowacountyedc.org/imagesb/ Meeting_Flyer_2_24_10.pdf

END.

If you're in the area please stop by!

Iowa County. Come grow with us.

Iowa County (WI) Area Entrepreneurs Club

REAP Food Group. Research, Education, Action and Policy on Food Group is building a regional food system that is healthful, just, and both environmentally and economically sustainable.

Something Special From Wisconsin. I believe Iowa County Economic Development is the first County EDC member in Wisconsin. I love this program.

Mark's Renaissance Farm. Who knew cinnamon rolls could become an addiction?

Download this media release in PDF format

Information about growing vegetables for the proposed Highland processing and freezing facility.

Labels: artisan food processing, entrepreneurship, innovation, Innovation Kitchen, new product development, platforms, slow money, slow startups, startups, Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen

The magazine Country Today did a nice piece on the new Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen recently.

I know I'm pretty enthusiastic about the entrepreneurship possibilities of local foods, but Editor Jim Massey caught me bubbling it seems. And I thought I was toning it down.

New, sustainable enterprises and regional food systems can be created to profitably serve the rapidly growing market for local foods.

Our new Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen, operated by the Hodan Center, will be a piece of that puzzle. The work Mark Olson and friends have created with the Driftless Foods prototype will surely be a vital and important prototype for larger regional food system replications.

These are not the ONLY pieces of the puzzle. A lot of parts go into a system. These are just our contributions to the discussion. We're doing experiments to help build reproducible regional food systems. The plan is to take that knowledge and help reproduce it with local groups working in their own foodsheds to create platforms for local foods entrepreneurship.

Here's a sampling from the Country Today article…

"Rick Terrien bubbles with enthusiasm when he talks about the economic development possibilities a new community kitchen will bring to Iowa County.

Terrien is so enthusiastic about the project that he's moving his economic development office into the building.

'This is such a fabulous story. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it,' he said."

What I think is so compelling about our new Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen, The Farm Market Kitchen in Algoma, and others that will be opening soon, is the opportunity to do so much good in so many directions.

Talked with John Aue from Butter Mountain organic potatoes this morning at the market about this. Between the Innovation Kitchen and Driftless Foods, we can potentially create possibilities for new, young farmers to come on line and food entrepreneurs to have easier, affordable access to the infrastructure, both hard (buildings and equipment) and soft (branding, marketing and pre-built sales channels). Along the way we can help existing farmers experiment in diversifying some of their operations, build in conservation enhancements, and get some cash flow going back towards our farmers and our rural communities.

These experiments won't get everything right. There will be value knowing what doesn't work also. However, I'm convinced the Driftless Foods project will become a replicable prototype for regional food systems. I'm also convinced that the Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen will open up new small-scale local foods processing opportunities that can be replicated elsewhere. I believe these opportunities can be profitable for all involved, especially the lucky consumers!

Mark Olson always says, 'There is genius in action'. Yep.


The Country Today article by Editor Jim Massey

Innovation Kitchen link at the new Iowa County EDC web site.

Butter Mountain organic specialty potatoes

The Farm Market Kitchen in Algoma, WI

Photo is of the Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen on Dec. 11, 2009. Getting closer!

Labels: artisan food processing, Driftless Foods, entrepreneurship, Innovation Kitchen, slow money, slow startups, Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen

A friend sent me to a good Business Week article ("Entrepreneurs Keep the Local Food Movement Hot", by John Tozzi, Dec. 18, 2009) discussing a new study called "Community Food Enterprise: Local Success in a Global Marketplace". The study created multiple case studies focusing on the economic and community benefits of local and regional food enterprises.

I like that this study includes a focus on local ownership of food businesses. Developing local ownership of local food infrastructure is at the core of the Driftless project.

Here's what Woody Tasch from Slow Money has to say on the subject: "Advocates for local food say success depends on nurturing an interlocking network of small companies that produce, process, distribute, and sell food." Tasch continues," "We as a society and as an economy need to start optimizing for a large number of small things, not just relying on a small number of large things."

The study was a project of the Wallace Foundation, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Here is an overview: "The local food movement is now spreading globally, yet is not well understood. To many, local food is exclusively about proximity, with discriminating consumers demanding higher quality food grown, caught, processed, cooked, and sold by people they know and trust. But an equally important part of local food is local ownership of food businesses. This report is about the full range of locally owned businesses involved in food, whether they are small or big, whether they are primary producers or manufacturers or retailers, whether their focus is local or global markets. We call these businesses community food enterprises (CFEs)."

"This report provides a detailed field report on the performance of 24 CFEs, half inside the United States and half international. We show that CFEs represent a huge diversity of legal forms, scales, activities, and designs."

They found 15 strategies for creating success consistent with their community character:

-Hard Work
-Innovation
-Local Delivery
-Aggregation
-Vertical Integration
-Shareholder Loyalty
-Speed
-Better Access
-Better Taste
-Better Story
-Better Stewardship
-Better Service
-Revitalizing Local Economies
-More Community Spirit
-More Social Change

As almost 5 years of posts on this blog will attest, this list above matches sustainable work practices I know to work.

I have not finished the full report, but this looks to be a wonderful effort toward identifying measurable economic and social benefit that arises from the development of Community Food Enterprises (CFEs). The individual case study I've been paying close attention to and highly recommend is their "Zingerman Community of Businesses".

As we work on our CFEs in the Iowa County area in the coming year, - especially the Driftless project - this kind of empirical support will be highly valuable.

There is a strong demand for local and regional foods and not enough infrastructure to help suppliers meet that demand.

Local foods and regional food systems are emerging as one of the hottest of all topics in economic development. What a time to be a local foods entrepreneur, investor, or - best of all - consumer!

Happy New Year 2010!


Community Food Enterprise report

Business Week Article, Entrepreneurs Keep the Local Food Movement Hot.

Slow Money Alliance

Thanks for the Business Week article tip to Neil Lerner, a friend and Director of the Madison area Small Business Development Center.

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Labels: artisan food processing, business plans, entrepreneurship, new product development, slow money, slow startups

My friend Mark Olson and I, with a scary-smart group of emerging friends, have been working out possibilities for our Iowa County initiative. This is an economic development prototype to build interrelated local food processing clusters, operated at a scale to meet institutional demand. These facilities will be located strategically across rural economies and organized in a way that is mutually self-supportive. The design of this system moves the bulk of the revenue through the management and production levels, delivering it to the producers and their communities. There is a link at the end to the summary white paper about this initiative that we presented at the Slow Money Institute in Madison this summer.

To me, creating experiments in all kinds of regional food systems is needed. This is a startup effort and startups are not straight-line endeavors. Stuff needs to get learned. Policies and procedures need to get worked out. That doesn't mean go slow. It means to hurry up. Let's make our mistakes early, often, and inexpensively. Our Iowa County / Driftless Foods initiative is a startup designed to to develop and document the knowledge needed take the next steps.

With that base in place, our goal is replication elsewhere: finding ways to deploy successful regional food systems models in other places and at bigger scales.

I had a great meeting this week with a nearby multi-state region of 10 to 15 counties. This may become an opportunity to replicate the Iowa County prototype in a larger, more diverse region sooner than later. I've got some great new friends across this area. I am not only confident, but flat-out excited that we could knit together a world-changing leadership team for this project. Our goal is to create a reproducible regional food system, this time at a bigger scale. The idea is that a successful multi-county (and especially multi-state) model would be one that could be replicated nationally in short order.

Of course, every area will have its own ag (and non ag) resources to contribute to these regional systems. However, I believe the process of organizing and deploying regional food systems is what's critical for making them successful and reproducible. That's at the heart of what is valuable here.

And, to walk-the-walk, I had a chance this week to say what I thought local food processing clusters most needed right now in response to a question from people who could make my answer happen. I had a chance to ask for a lot of money but (per last week's post) I actually said enabling legislation.

On first review I was sure I should have said money, mostly because it's likely true. However, if regional food systems are to be made replicable, they really need some meta support, like enabling legislation, that will give people working on local food initiatives some actual tools to help them move the discussion forward. We need to quit talking about this and take some action steps. We need to create opportunities, enable infrastructure, build markets, create jobs and jump start economic development by nurturing market demand and giving our entrepreneurs a stable platform to grow from.

I remember the early days of recycled paper. It was a good idea that everyone talked about but was stuck in kind of a niche market of early adopters. When the Wisconsin government decided to emphasize the use of recycled paper in its purchasing, that business took off and we've never looked back.

I would suggest that we don't need more requirements, but if the enabling legislation were to just say that opportunities to utilize locally grown and locally processed foods should be explored, it would be huge. The locally processed language would give permission and support to people within local institutions - schools, hospitals, etc. - to see what they can do with local foods. Their buying power will ultimately most enable the success of this process. I would not make these institutions buy locally grown and locally processed foods. I would make it easier for them to do.

If the enabling legislation just indicated that locally grown and locally processed foods were included as a recommendation, but not a requirement, many valuable interests could be served, bypassing potential battle lines.

So, a really wonderful week for local foods processing. Future's so bright… I gotta wear shades. Based on what we learned this week we're planning on ramping up the pace of the rollout of our Iowa County initiative.

As my friend Mark always signs off, be well.


Download PDF white paper on our local food processing initiative first presented to the Slow Money Institute gathering in Madison this summer.

A great interview with Salli Martyniak of Forward Community Investments and Wally Orzechowski of Southwest Wisconsin Community Action Program about community investing. Wally is a friend and is a leader in our team rolling out the Driftless Foods / Iowa County initiative. Salli is a new friend who leads one of the most valuable enterprises I've come across in any field, Forward Community Investments

An interview with Mark Olson about his wonderful Renaissance Farm and adding value to agriculture.

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, innovation, new product development, open source economic development, platforms, slow money, slow startups, startups

I am really looking forward to a presentation I get to share with the Wisconsin Economic Development Association (WEDA) this coming Monday evening, Nov. 9. They have asked me to discuss opening a new economic development organization.

I am coming up on my first anniversary as an economic developer in rural Wisconsin.

On my first day on the job, Dec. 1, 2008, I was sitting in a vacant conference room in Dodgeville, WI. I had been shoveling info into a newly cloned database as fast as I could all day. I turned on the radio that evening as I set up to leave. I learned that a recession was officially declared to be underway. That day the Dow Jones fell almost 700 points, the 4th biggest drop in its history. To welcome me to my new gig, there was a whopper snowstorm clogging up all of the upper Midwest. Welcome to economic development.

For my talk on Monday I have limited expertise to share about economic development theory but I certainly can share what its like to take on this kind of opportunity as a working entrepreneur.

In short, there are deep and profound opportunities available in our rural and urban economies right now. What's needed now are small, measurable action steps. If we're to create a new and better economy we need to launch as many intelligent experiments as possible, learn from them, and repeat.

I'm convinced our Iowa County initiative is a valuable experiment in this mix. All around us there are big, amorphous, meta discussions underway about improving economic development. But that's all they typically are. Discussions.

Mark Olson and I had a wonderful meeting this week with a gentleman who helps lead USDA Rural Development in Wisconsin. He shared with us a really compelling story about his early work in community development that involved red lining in poor neighborhoods. Their team was most successful when they restricted their organizing and development efforts to a geographically limited footprint. When they did that, their efforts succeeded. They could impose timelines, measurement metrics and then get on with it. When problems arose, they had a manageable scope to deal with. When their peers and managers tried to design 'more efficient' experiments in larger geographic areas, valuable data was lost and the efforts to make things better inevitably failed.

That's why I'm so pumped up about this county scale experiment Mark and I are working on. If it leaks into neighboring counties as we roll it out, all the better. Regions should be knit together by this kind of work.

What's valuable is that we will have a geography in which real experiments can be run and real meaning can be extracted. I want something that works and that's reproducible.

If something like this can't be made to work in one county, it can't be made to work in 5 or 20 or 72 counties. We're preparing a small, smart action step to help take those first steps.

Let the studies follow (informed) action. I want to make well-reasoned, inexpensive mistakes and learn. One foot in front of the other stuff, but for goodness sake, let's do something. Let's put economic development in service to the people who need it, not those who just want to talk about it.

I am very impressed by the potential for USDA Rural Development in Wisconsin to make a national impact. Their interest in our experiment is exciting.




USDA Rural Development, Wisconsin

I made new friends this week who work with Forward Community Investments. This is a wonderful organization that works with nonprofits in Wisconsin to help them make strategic financial decisions and build their financial capacity for greater success. They are holding a cool looking community investing conference on November 19th, in Madison.

I've also made new friends in the Austin, TX area bootstrapping group. I am delighted to be included in their doings. If you are in the Austin area there is a good looking gathering on Monday evening 11/9.

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, innovation, open source economic development, slow money, startups

As time allows, I'm going to continue posting about the six steps I think people need to take for launching their own slow startup enterprise.

This post is about the second of the six steps, gathering information in a way that adds value to your idea and sustainability to the platforms you will work from.

In other words, this is about business planning and slow startup enterprises.

A slow startup focuses on creating a new enterprise with limited time and funds. These enterprises are meant to bring increasing sustainability into people's lives and the communities they live in.

The common thread among all types of enterprise, rural or urban, is the need for a map of where you're headed. In the case of a slow startup that map doesn't represent a straight line to an unchangeable goal. A slow startup map, like all great tools, offers many alternate ways of getting somewhere valuable.

The subject of business planning and creating business plans can be presented as a daunting, jargon-laden realm where only experts dwell. There are certainly some kinds of business plans that require that kind of sophistication, but they represent a small slice of the business creation pie.

A slow startup would look at three main areas of focus when building their road map:

Learn what business planning is about and how it can be used for your own personal benefit.

Learn how to find resources for your business planning.

Learn how to create a business planning map, start, then learn from what happens next.

Business planning for slow startups is not an exercise in creating a document for outside investors or approaching banks and funding agencies for loans, though it can certainly be the basis for such efforts in the future. For now, it is a process of gathering information to help make you and your enterprise competent and sustainable.

From my Business Diligence and teaching work I developed a slow startup business plan I can put online. The entrepreneurs complete it as time allows and I can jump in as needed. I've begun using it in my rural economic development work.

Slow startup planning specifically can benefit small food enterprises (SFEs) such as those we hope to nurture at the new Innovation Kitchen and other slow startups that people grow from their kitchen tables.

This isn't the place to go into all the particulars, but a slow startup business plan is meant to work in service to the entrepreneur, not outside funders. It is meant to be a roadmap that includes your specific goals, acknowledging the specific assets and hurdles you face. Great business plans are not cookie-cutter templates. They are working, living documents that entrepreneurs can use to grow personally and to grow their enterprises.

Importantly, there is a strong, wonderful movement emerging of micro-lending investment platforms focusing on person-to-person business relationships in the Kiva style. Kiva has created a transparent, highly ethical model that empowers me and hundreds of thousands of micro investors to invest and loan small amounts to innovators worldwide.

New funding/micro-loan platforms are emerging that will focus on specific types of enterprise, such as eco-tech and sustainable foods. For new and emerging entrepreneurs to benefit from this opportunity, they won't necessarily need a fixed-in-stone business plan but they will need to be able to produce and demonstrate a competent planning map.

Dwight Eisenhower said, "Plans are nothing; planning is everything." If that approach was good enough for the largest military invasion in world history, then I would suggest it's a safe approach for your slow startup.

You need to plan, act, revise, repeat. That's the essence of a great slow startup business plan.

Don't let that process dissuade you from starting. Start and build. Search out the information you'll need to know to grow. Make it personal. Make it your own. Business planning is an iterative process. One foot in front of the other on a march planned to include alternate routes. If you don't start you'll never have a map. Without a map you'll just continue to wander, or worse, never start your journey.

This isn't hard. You can do it. If you start now you can build something valuable into your life and into the fabric of the communities you live in.

Slow startups are designed to fit into your life as it's lived now. Take advantage of the help, support and tools available and begin.

Entrepreneurship represents the core of the emerging economy of the 21st century. Join that revolution and see where it takes you.

Acknowledge the time needed. Plan your map. Map your plan. Start. You can do it.


Kiva

Northern Water Snake

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, funding, slow money, slow startups, startups, The slow start up movement

The economy is rebuilding, but I don't know anyone who feels relaxed about their future economic security.

People want to put some stability and meaning back into their economic lives. There are certainly many paths to get there.

I've been writing about slow startups as a viable path for creating smart new enterprises that can make significant financial and cultural improvements in people's lives.

We've got slow food, and now slow money. Why not slow startups? Everyone wants viable new solutions and the emerging model is competence and sustainability, not speed.

Just as there is great honor in slow foods and what that idea brings to commerce, there is also great honor and long-term value in creating slow enterprise models.

We need to make entrepreneurship simpler and more accessible. We need to nurture entrepreneurship that builds and sustains our communities and our regions. We need to help people create and build their own enterprises in ways that fit into their lives appropriately.

Slow startups take into account whatever your personal and financial status is. This model allows you to build and test your own enterprise at your own pace, so that in the end you will have a service or a product that you're passionate about and a sustainable business model supporting it.

Slow startups certainly match up well with my own boomer demographic. I also think these kind of slow launches will fit in well with the wonderful artisinal young people doing so many cool things out there. And if you're in the middle, what's wrong with trying to create a long-term job for yourself by slowly starting your own business now?

So, here's my news: Most startups take far longer than the people think. This is especially true for small, self-funded startups. That's not a bad thing, it just is. What this should be saying to you is to start creating your own small business ASAP. It will take longer than you think to get underway. Start one while you have a day job. Start one in your spare time. I know, this is not easy, but the time is there. Find what time you can and put it to work.

By taking the process slowly, you will learn far more than by rushing through it. You will learn to enjoy the journey.

If you REALLY love this process after trying it out, you can circle back and do startups over and over - a perfectly viable and compelling career path in the 21st century.

In trying to help some new enterprises through our economic development office, I've been re-using the Micro-Enterprise courses I wrote and taught through the Small Business Center at WCTC in Waukesha. It's my slow startup manual.

Slow startups perfectly suit micro-enterprise and vice versa.

What do I really mean? I mean you can invest a few hundred dollars and a year or two of part time effort and come out the other end with a viable enterprise that's making money and building greater security and independence into your life. From there you can nurture and grow it in any direction you want.

If you have more time and money to invest, you can shorten your timeline to launch. This also makes it possible to make expensive mistakes. Careful.

So, start now. Start slow. Take some time to think about this and explore the possibilities. Here is my outline:

Slow startups. What to do first.

There are six fairly simple, but critically important steps to launching a slow startup. These make slow startups sustainable:

- Get a realistic understanding of what it takes to wake up an idea, as well as the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship and how to plan for both.

- Learn what information you'll need, how to find it, and how to use that information once you find it.

- Learn how become a professional at what you do, and where to turn for help.

- Create a management structure that builds your own confidence, deals with the details, and creates peace of mind for all involved.

- Learn how to market and sell in your niche.

- Learn to capture your data and turn it into commerce.

These six approaches to slow startups were the core of the six courses I wrote and taught through the Small Business Center.

They are my roadmap for creating slow startup enterprises. Each one of these topics unfolded into a 90+ minute discussion in my Micro-Enterprise courses when we dug into all the how-to stuff. There are multiple, discreet steps behind each of these major categories. I really loved sharing these ideas in depth.

I want you to know that it's not complicated. It just takes time. Take informed, measured steps. Develop mastery in small valuable steps. Make as many inexpensive mistakes as you can as quickly as you can. Execute. Innovate. Repeat.

It is not hard, but it does take time. Slow startups. Start one now and you'll thank yourself down the road.

As Tom Peters says, "Everyone has a chance to learn, improve, and build up their skills. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark."

This is the Renaissance Age of entrepreneurship, and its just beginning.

Welcome friend. Now get going.


Tom Peters site

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, innovation, new product development, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

In most discussions about entrepreneurship, the talk usually comes around to 'creative destruction'. This is a term created by economist Joseph Schumpeter. It describes the inevitable loss of value in enterprises that do not innovate.

Wikipedia's description: "In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power."

If you are on the losing side, it is painful and sad when the market share of older companies is eaten by younger more innovative enterprises.

What's useful here is that innovation is available to everyone. Innovation does not have to equal high, unmanaged growth. Innovation can be increased value and service to your stakeholders (think of the excellent book, Small Giants). Indeed, innovation is limitless and never-ending by its nature. So yes, there will be creative destruction.

The next step is to build platforms for 'creative birthing'. I see 'creative birthing' as a way to prosper through the inevitable destruction by allowing ever-increasing numbers of individuals and groups to participate in innovation and entrepreneurship. Even as creative destruction overtakes the less nimble, people involved in those dying companies will have the advantage of easily participating in new, more creative and innovative launches.

Hybrid entity/governance models will likely emerge. New kinds of stakeholders will likely emerge (think of the great new work forming within the Slow Money Alliance). By supporting 'creative birthing' processes and platforms, I think economic regions can prosper. Those that don't help enable easier 'creative birthing' processes will eventually suffer.

In a previous post I linked to a study showing that regions with the highest business 'birth rates' (startups, which everyone celebrates) also had the highest 'death rates' of companies going under. Many places treat these business closures as failures, while the most successful places (highest birth rates) celebrate the culture of entrepreneurship and make pathways into that model easier.

Working in a social profit (non-profit) organization that is neither private or government, I feel a wonderful nimbleness to work on models to make entrepreneurship easier. Governments shouldn't do this stuff. Too often, private enterprise is locked in to their own form of 'creative destruction' and not interested in new options. The best enterprises don't do this, but they are typically a minority.

I think the local food processing cluster we are trying to build is a worthy experiment in 'creative birthing'. However, this is not 'The' experiment, it's 'an' experiment. There are countless other experiments possible across all types of enterprises and geographies.

There is no other way to deal with creative destruction than acknowledge it and build systems to temper and even utilize that destruction: creative birthing is here to stay.

I greatly enjoyed sharing some of these ideas with many new friends in the Regional Food Systems Working Group at the Leopold Center this week. The meeting was held at the beautiful Iowa Arboretum in Madrid, IA. I highly recommend a visit!



Wikipedia, 'Creative Destruction'

Prior post on birth rates / death rates

Slow Money Alliance

Regional Food Systems Working Group

Small Giants, by Bo Burlingham

Iowa Arboretum

Labels: bootstrapping, business plans, Driftless Foods, entrepreneurship, new product development, open source economic development, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

Here in Wisconsin there is great interest in creating publicly available kitchen space to help small, local food enterprises come to life and grow. The short hand term for these efforts is 'kitchen incubators'. The model is that you can rent a state certified (expensive!) kitchen for a modest hourly rate and grow your own food business.

In our area, safety requires that foods produced for public sale need to be processed and packaged in a state inspected facility. Frankly this is a critical marketing benefit to be state certified. These inspections are probably required in most states, but I have not had the time to research.

The idea is to utilize public and private funds as available to create public shared-use kitchens as tools to enable local farmers, food enthusiasts, and food lovers of all kinds to become entrepreneurs.

I believe this idea will work for all kinds of locations. I see a very special place for this work in rural economic development where I spend my time.

I'm wrapped up in this subject at the moment. We have a public shared-use kitchen (kitchen incubator) opening in Iowa County early next year. It will be owned and operated by The Hodan Center, a wonderful enterprise celebrating and enriching the lives of people with disabilities. I am working with the Hodan Center on creating a public shared-use kitchen platform, available to the public when not used by Hodan activities.

I grew up with entrepreneurs, and I've been a working entrepreneur for 35 years. I honestly don't think I've ever seen a bigger, better or easier opportunity to explore entrepreneurship than in what I'm seeing now.

The Slow Money folks refer to these businesses as Small Food Enterprises (SFEs).

I dearly love this idea, but I don't think the phrase 'kitchen incubator' does this movement justice. The possibilities are much bigger and much more profound.

'Innovation Kitchen' is my term of art that embraces the new entrepreneurship possibilities of food. I am fully enchanted with what can happen from these kinds of platforms.

Creating a kitchen is not enough. Creating a network is what is needed. We are calling our new platform 'The Wisconsin Food Innovation Network', or, the Innovation Kitchen' for short.

In our area, we are all indebted to Mary Pat Carlson of the Farm Market Kitchen in Algoma, WI (linked below). Mary Pat pioneered this concept in Wisconsin and is making it work. Mary Pat is generously helping those of us with new kitchens in the planning and building stages understand what's required for these to succeed.

What excites me so much about this idea is that is speaks so clearly to the almost endless possibilities for entrepreneurship these certified kitchen platforms provide.

I've been saying for a long time that this is the Renaissance Age of entrepreneurship and that it's just beginning. I believe our Innovation Kitchen can become a model for enabling all kinds of economies, but the economic development benefits can be especially transformational for rural and agricultural regions.

Our new Wisconsin Food Innovation Network will focus on creating a sustainable platform for creating and growing food-based enterprises. I see the network aspect of this as creating, in advance, relationships for the kitchen with buyers, vendors, professional advisers, and entrepreneurship assets.

The Wisconsin Food Innovation Network will open its Innovation Kitchen in Mineral Point, WI in early 2010. We are planning the public-use protocols with the idea of learning what is most sustainable and reproducible over time and in other locations.

I'll be dedicating our first Iowa County Entrepreneur and Inventor Club meeting to a wide ranging discussion of the kitchen with Hodan staff available for questions. That meeting will be Wednesday, Sept. 23 in Dodgeville, WI at the Stonefield Apartments. Doors open at 5:30 PM. Meeting starts at 6.

I have focused these posts recently on our work to help create our Iowa County Initiative, Driftless Foods. This is designed to create a planned system for a local-foods processing cluster in a discreet region. The Innovation Kitchen fits this project hand in glove. It is my belief that over time, some entrepreneurs working from the Innovation Kitchen will 'graduate' into bigger revenue roles and need bigger processing and support capabilities. We will have that infrastructure waiting for them with Driftless Foods.

The time has come to roll this out big time. I am SO looking forward to working with and supporting the Hodan Center and the Wisconsin Food Innovation Network.

I will use this space to report back on what worked, what didn't, and (oh my!) all those possibilities….


The Hodan Center

The Farm Market Kitchen

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, innovation, new product development, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

When Woody Tasch from Slow Money came to town last week I was startled to hear him respectfully and with gratitude reference the book Small is Beautiful.

I'd read Slow Money and was struck by the possibilities but hadn't connected the work to E. F. Schumacher and his great book, "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered."

But this is a natural 21st century marriage. Efficient, market-driven financial discipline, with sustainable goals and methods, (Slow Money) meets smart, appropriate-scale technologies, in this case taking the form of local foods and sustainable agriculture.

What a magic time for this combination to occur. Demand is off the chart for local foods. Production and processing techniques are faster, smarter, cheaper. Tools for design, organizing, marketing, sales and distribution have never been better or less expensive. I'm back to the fact that this is indeed the Renaissance age of entrepreneurship, and it's just beginning.

Food is an issue whose time has come. There is a wonderful quote from Wisconsin's own Aldo Leopold in his Sand County Almanac that ties in here. Think about the following Leopold quote in terms of sustainable agriculture, local processing, local foods and healthy, more compelling communities; "By and large our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and are proud of our yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria for its successful use."

Free markets have nurtured the greatest freedoms in human history, but we need to apply those tools in less destructive, more successful ways especially in the way we feed and nurture ourselves and the place we live.

As a group of us works to design an efficient, reproducible local foods processing system with our Driftless Foods, Iowa County initiative, none of us are taking anything as gospel. Small is beautiful not because it sounds good as a theory on paper but because technology has evolved small, smart, nimble processing equipment that makes better use of resources and produces higher, more sustainable profits. That's why small is beautiful. Schumacher was [is!] right.

Small is a matter of perspective certainly. The multiple local foods processing plants we are designing to work in a self-supportive coalition, are not garden sheds. They will take a lot of money by anyone's standards. They will be technologically and environmentally brilliant. Small? No, compared to farmyard vegetable stands. Yes, compared to the Wall Street backed food system now falling apart.

One of my favorite Schumacher quotes sums up what a new local foods processing system might look like: "The aim ought to be to obtain the maximum amount of well being with the minimum amount of consumption." That is, an ultra lean, wise production system that creates great multi-generational jobs for a community, passing the bulk of the profits into a pool that all contributors are compensated from equitably.

I'm going to post the first Driftless Foods Cooperative white paper that we produced by separate headline following this. It's a short overview of the project.

Small is beautiful because it is smart, sustainable and profitable. Above all else small is valuable because it is reproducible .

In economic terms, that's a beautiful thing.



The E.F. Schumacher Society

Small is Beautiful. Wikipedia

The Aldo Leopold Foundation

Aldo Leopold. Wikipedia

The Aldo Leopold quote in this post is from the dedications page of the 25th Anniversary edition of Small is Beautiful.

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, green tech, innovation, regional fair trade, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

A great week for local food processing.

What a week of positive steps. Entrepreneurship is flowering in the world of local foods in ways that I have never seen. This is the renaissance age of entrepreneurship and it's happening extensively in local foods.

Several great highlights to report.

Wood Tasch was in Madison last Monday for their 5th Slow Money Institute. Woody and Slow Money are linked below.

My friend Bartlett Durand is from Otter Creek Organics in Iowa County, home farm of Gary Zimmer, a new friend I greatly admire and United States 2008 US Organic Farmer of the Year. Bartlett summed up the positive emotion in the room on the day of the Slow Money presentation when he fists-up challenged the room and the world with, "It starts here. It's starts now." That was not rhetoric. It was 'run toward the sounds of the guns' stuff (listen to the interview with Woody linked below to get an idea of the buzz in the room all day). The time for local foods is now. And it is erupting in Wisconsin in many amazing ways. Local food development and local food processing models will emerge from our region that will empower people worldwide.

I was privileged to be able to make a presentation about our Iowa County initiative, the Driftless Foods Co-Op, at the Slow Money Institute (SMI), along with my great partner in this adventure, Mark Olson from Renaissance Farm. Margaret Bau, legendary cooperative developer from USDA Rural Development and a member of our Driftless Foods organizing committee, also presented to the SMI.

The next day a few of us had an amazing two hour meeting with Mr. Rod Nilsestuen, our Secretary of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection in Wisconsin.

Mr. Nilsestuen was over-the-top helpful. Mark Olson and Lois Federman, both good friends I've written about, were at this gathering. When I think about all the meetings I've been to in my life, I count this among the few that I would call the most productive. We got to discuss the Iowa County initiative that we outlined at Slow Money the day before. Because we are proposing to organize as a cooperative, Secretary Nilsestuen's background and bias-for-action were transformative. What he was able to bring to our discussion was immeasurably helpful. Mark and I were executing valuable action steps before we hit the parking lot based on what we learned from the previous couple of hours.

Mr. Nilsestuen was the leader of the Wisconsin Federation of Cooperatives for 24 years, which represented about 860 co-ops with 1.8 million members in endeavors ranging from finance and insurance to rural development and agriculture. In 2003, Mr. Nilsestuen was inducted into the National Cooperative Hall of Fame at the National Federation of Cooperatives.

Driftless Foods will be organized as a cooperative because it makes sense for this specific application. I have not been a co-op guy in the past, but there are some inherently beautiful ways to design systems of interdependent, self-supporting enterprises that are perfect for a cooperative structure.

And as for the bigger picture of creating those enterprises and nurturing entrepreneurship...

As a working entrepreneur, the only secret I can reliably pass on about what kind of businesses are best to start is that you should look for what's broken and create opportunities from that. I can't ever remember a moment where entrepreneurship was on such a verge to flourish and succeed.

In the world of local foods, local food processing is the missing link. We have created enormous demand for local foods with consumers, food stores, and restaurants. The production, or supply side, is not being developed in ways that are sufficient to meet this demand.

My immersion into Slow Money early in the week followed by clear, valuable, tactical support for action from key stakeholders in government, academia, and the investor community was invigorating. This is a moment for local foods and for economies of all shapes and sizes to, as Bartlett said above, recognize that the time to change is 'right here, right now'.

I am personally enchanted with the work of Slow Money, and I am empowered by the vision of Mr. Nilsestuen.

I've been a working entrepreneur for more than 35 years. I have never in my life seen this level of commitment to entrepreneurship and creating new enterprises. Watching it happen in the world of local foods is breathtakingly cool.

I can't wait for next week!



Woody Tasch interview with Bill Lubing

Secretary Nilsestuen's CV at the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture Trade and Consumer Protection.

Otter Creek Organics


Lubing Creative

Slow Money new friend Odessa Piper: "Local is the distance the heart can travel." Odessa is the founder of the world renown L'Etoile Restaurant in Madison. She has promised to share her essay behind this quote in a future post.

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, new product development, open source economic development, regional fair trade, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

I have been smitten by the ideas championed by Woody Tasch in a wonderful book titled "Slow Money. Investing as if food, farms, and fertility mattered".

The title is a riff on the theme of slow foods, the concept of beautifully prepared simple, local foods, natural diversity and nurturing community. Mr. Tasch has devoted his life to investment capital and knows those ropes well. He has now turned his skill toward building an organization that takes the principals of investment and applies them to the widespread needs of our broken food system through his Slow Money Alliance.

I've pulled a set of representative quotes from this great book below. Mr. Tasch will be giving a public talk in Madison, WI next Sunday evening, July 26. Details follow this post.

What draws me to this effort is the realism that is embedded throughout. Throughout my life I've watched many, many well-intentioned 'movements' dissolve into inaction. This Slow Money effort feels significantly different. They are planning their rollout of millions of dollars of investments into Small Food Enterprises (SFEs) through a series of Institutes held around the country. Madison will host the next Slow Money Institute, and I'm honored to be involved as a presenter. I will be discussing the '760 square mile incubator' we are creating in Iowa County, WI. That effort will create and integrate multiple SFEs, primarily local processing facilities, under the guidance of a leadership co-op that follows the operating principles for economic development first created at Mondregon in Spain.

I highly recommend 'Slow Money', by Woody Tasch. I do so mostly because Slow Money does not present itself as another 'ism' or another theory. Slow Money is a tool for our times.

Check out some quotes from the book:

"It falls to us to undertake a new project of system design: the creation of new forms of intermediation that catalyze the transition from a commerce of extraction and consumption to a commerce of preservation and restoration". NOTE: It is not left to someone else, the challenge is directed to "us."

There are many new thoughtful investors and angel investment groups beginning to focus on early stage companies that create commercial solutions to social and environmental problems.

"A 'patient capital' marketplace is emerging to better serve such companies, since most are not easy candidates for the same dollars that are seeking the next Google. Patient capital does not yet exist as an organized or disciplined asset class; it is the gestalt that emerges as socially responsible investing matures and the wave of triple-bottom-line [social, environmental and economic accounting] entrepreneurs and investors builds… Applied to the food sector, patient capital becomes slow money - whose name carries with it more than a doff of the cap to Slow Food, the international NGO that promotes biodiversity, artisan food traditions, heirloom varieties and connections between small farmers and consumers. Slow money can be thought of as a subsector, or sub-asset class of patient capital, focused with appropriate patience on the health of soil and bioregion."

If you are a thinking of becoming an entrepreneur, now is your time. If you are an investor looking to go beyond 'social investing', now is your time. I believe slow money is a real tool that will have real positive consequences, right down to the farm family with the best tomato chutney recipe, somewhere out there in our beautiful rural landscape. The time to fix this mess in right here. Right now.

Mr Tasch discusses a new kind of market that is rapidly developing around slow money. "We need a market that rewards humility and promotes patience and invites the participation of all those individuals who will sleep better at night knowing that some of their dollars are swirling around cyberspace a little bit slower, lending a little bit less of their energy to the economic engine that brought us, last year, 8 million light trucks and SUVs, and who knows how many million Twinkies. We need a peaceful market, a market that rewards peaceful companies, a market that dares to recognize explicitly, publicly and financially, that growth, growth, growth is predicated on dislocation and churn and continuously reinvented and unsatisfiable consumer demand, and that these conditions constitute a form of economic violence."

There are many, many more quotes highlighted in my dog-eared copy of Slow Money. Too many to put into a single post.

As the soul of Sustainable Work is entrepreneurship, let me close with a beautiful piece that helped me knit together the ideas of rural economies and entrepreneurship as I started in my current role doing rural economic development.

"Entrepreneurs and farmers are the poets of the economy. They are holders of ambiguity and risk. They cultivate interstitial spaces, where demand and need and aspiration coexist in a mildly turbulent state of chaotic possibility. They continuously test the boundaries of quality and quantity, as a poet tests the boundaries of denotation and connotation. Ideas in a business plan; seeds in potting soil; rhymes in search of new reasons."

Great language. Great concepts. A thoroughly great book.

This is the Renaissance age of entrepreneurship and it's just beginning, my entrepreneur/farmer/poet friends. Forward!


The Slow Money web site

The next Slow Money Institute (Madison, WI), will be Monday, July 27th. Woody Tasch will give a public talk on Sunday, July 26th at 7:30 p.m. at Morphy Hall on the University of Wisconsin campus, 455 North Park Street in Madison.

Triple botton line, Wikipedia

Labels: entrepreneurship, open source economic development, regional fair trade, slow money, The slow start up movement

I usually use these posts to share something enlightening that works in support of my premise that we need to create economic security for ourselves and for our communities by making jobs through new enterprises.

For folks who have tagged along on these essays, some of what I do for my day jobs has come through. This post will be one of those essays, following up on a couple of recent ones about developing new smarter, faster, cheaper startups.

I currently am privileged to work in rural economic development in a very special place, Iowa County, Wisconsin. It's immediately west of Madison and just up the road from Dubuque, where IBM has just transformed the economic landscape by moving a huge data support center there. The landscape of where I work is spectacular. It's called the 'Driftless region' because the landscape has never been flattened by glaciers. It is a land of ancient mountains and pristine valleys, now softened by time into a scale that is so pleasant I can't do it justice.

This beautiful upper Midwest landscape is surrounded by 35 million people within a few hours drive. The rise of regional economics, especially in foods is compelling. In service to this economic and geographic landscape I'm working with wonderful new friends to launch a new job creation platform we hope to make transparent and reproducible in other counties, and other states. If we do it well enough it will work in other continents. That would be a good gift from the upper Midwest Driftless region I love so much.

So, here's a first report from the field.

We held a kickoff meeting for interested stakeholders in a wonderful one room schoolhouse built in 1875. Just down the hill from Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen, it now serves as the Town hall for the Town of Wyoming in Iowa County. When we first assembled our mailing list 12 days before the meeting, we only had 15 people on the list. As word spread during those first days, over 200 people had asked to be included. When the day came, I sat in the empty schoolhouse whistling past the graveyard as they say. When the time came however, the building came alive.

More than 50 people from all over Wisconsin attended. We had a wonderful group of farmers, food buyers, ag specialists, investors, community bankers, people from every place on the political spectrum, University folks, people from USDA Rural Development, and on and on. This is a topic people really want to delve into.

And we did.

The gist of what we are proposing is the creation of a leadership co-op based on a model developed in Mondregon, in the Basque region of Spain. They start and launch new interrelated enterprises based on a proven system of training, research, financing and mentorship. [See links at the end]. Rather than gush about the good stuff, let me highlight one number. When new enterprises are created under this model the success rate for those new businesses after 5 years is 97%. You read that right. In doing so they have created about 200,000 good paying sustainable jobs.

What this means is that investors, who typically have to wrench huge returns out of startup investments because so many fail, can now approach this model with a sense that their risks are largely mitigated, and they can participate in the economics of these emerging enterprises with longer term, more secure return expectations.

What this would mean to my beautiful county is that we can create a leadership co-op of a few key visionaries who are not afraid to fail and who hold a new vision for creating jobs and building economic independence in a real and lasting way.

In a post I put up earlier this month I talked about smarter, faster, cheaper economic development models for rural economic development.

Our new effort in support of this plan is what we are doing about it. We are calling the effort the Driftless Foods Co-Op. The people that are coming to join this new effort are amazing. I've done many startups before and I have never ever seen talent and ethics like this emerge.

We are working to develop the financing and the infrastructure to begin processing foods that we refer to produced and marketed under 'regional fair trade' standards.

We are forming the leadership co-op now. It is my hope to begin build the first food plant so that it can start processing this year. I would like to build 2 more plants the following year under the umbrella of the Driftless Foods Co-Op. The following year I hope to add 3 more plants.

We are promising our stakeholders and anyone who cares to listen that we are doing this as an experiment. We want our work to be used to create case studies and documentation such that our efforts and policies can be reproduced elsewhere, with different ag assets, probably even non-ag assets. I posit that it's the process that needs to be honed to a reproducible model. Given all that entails - financing, production, mentor relations, community relations, worker participation, buyer transparency, and on and on - this little experiment can be used to make the economics of business creation and job growth far more sustainable and valuable than the policies responsible for what we're experiencing now.

This is my kind of economic development. Work that drives revenue and security to the producers and the communities they live in. It's an energetic, well-grounded launch with wonderful people and noble, sustainable goals.

If we do it right, we just may be able to change the world in small but important ways that last for generations.

Happy Independence Day!


Mondragon in the Basque region of northern Spain is the shining example of an entrepreneurial economy shaped by over 100 co-ops owned by 200,000 people. Thanks to the Mondragon co-ops, the people of the Basque region enjoy one of the highest standards of living in all of Europe while being phenomenally entrepreneurial. Mondragon is proof that co-op ownership can work on a grand scale and compete globally.

Article about our Driftless Foods Co-Op kickoff meeting in the Wisconsin State Journal

Download our working definition of regional fair trade, in PDF

The Mondragon model comes to the inner city Mid West.

Labels: boomers, business plans, entrepreneurship, new product development, regional fair trade, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

Inc. Magazine has just given their June cover story over to Paul Graham and his wonderful Y Combinator startup machine.

I've written about Paul Graham a number of times in the past and linked to his sites, which I'll do again at the end of this post. You should know about Mr. Graham and his model for doing - not talking about - actually doing, economic development.

The cover story is titled "The Start-Up Guru. Paul Graham has launched 145 companies. His formula? Smaller. Cheaper. Faster."

In a great story written by Max Chalkin, he opens with the this position: "Graham's system generates scores of bold ideas, churns out dozens of new companies, and creates hundreds of jobs - for a lot less money than you might think."

At its core, Y Combinator is a venture capital fund, operating with small ball investments of $10K or so. More importantly, Paul Graham trains his startups to make things people want and change rapidly as they learn from their mistakes. He doesn't have any high finance back-office structure to accomplish all this. Y Combinator runs out of Graham's home office. Yet he has generated more than 500 jobs with his startups over the last couple of years and this job creation pace is accelerating as his startups mature and are acquired.

The Inc. Magazine piece is too short to do justice to what Mr. Graham is pulling off. It also doesn't give much background about his philosophy, which you can learn more about through his essays (below). Suffice it to say that he builds his entrepreneurs into realistic enterprises ready to face the world. A quote I really loved from the piece sums it up: "Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly. But working for a large company is like being waterboarded."

OK. All of the startups Graham and Y Combinator do are software related. Logical. Graham is a Silicon Valley guy. However, here is where I would introduce my question. Why can't this model be adapted for all kinds of industries and geographies? I would posit that all that would need changing is the exit strategies for investors/stakeholders.

In fact I'm proposing just this kind of model in my day job doing rural economic development. I will say very specifically that the move toward rural small business development highly favors boomers and knowledge workers, typically people wearing both hats.

Why can't we launch many small, fast, fun, smart new farms and ag processing enterprises? Why can't we make training and tools and small ball investments available that will allow people in rural and urban areas to tie into each others economic and cultural self interests in ways that benefit both?

Certainly there is a vast structure of entrepreneurship talk therapy out there. What's needed even more is strategic and financial participation, as well as launch help for farmers in transition, new farmers, and cool new processing facilities emerging to meet the rapidly evolving new world of regional food economics.

My new friends at U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development have shown me a powerful organizational structure that can be used to accomplish these kind of goals. Adapting that structure to Y Combinator like 21st century speed, nimbleness, and adapt-as-you-go enterprise training seem like a perfect marriage for doing effective rural economic development.

With my new friends, especially Mark Olson of Renaissance Farm, we hope to make Iowa County Wisconsin a 763 square mile business incubator for progressive, effective rural economic development. We will be having a roll-out meeting for regional stakeholders to discuss this proposal on June 15 from 3 to 5 PM. eMail me for details if you have an interest.

It's high time we put the coolest startup smarts (Y Combinator) into projects that build our rural communities, grow more farmers and create a growing network of sustainable food infrastructure.

Smaller. Faster. Cheaper. Yum!


Y Combinator

Paul Graham essays

Renaissance Farm

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement, women entrepreneurs

I had a wonderful experience this week speaking with a group of energized citizens.

There is nothing that can focus your attention on the good in life better than hanging around with people working to make that happen.

We got to share some stories about the kinds of businesses people were starting; why people were starting them; and importantly, how energized citizens can participate and help.

I'd been thinking about a NY Times piece from this past week called "Weary of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own".

Matt Richtel reported from San Francisco, and Jenna Wortham from New York.

It was decidedly downbeat about people being pushed into "forced entrepreneurship", as described by Mark V. Cannice, executive director of the entrepreneurship program at the University of San Francisco.

However, he also described reality as I see it, “If there is a silver lining, the large-scale downsizing from major companies will release a lot of new entrepreneurial talent and ideas — scientists, engineers, business folks now looking to do other things,” Mr. Cannice said. “It’s a Darwinian unleashing of talent into the entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

A Darwinian unleashing of talent. An unplanned opportunity to create real solutions to real problems.

I wouldn't restrict the new entrepreneurs to just those categories described above. I'd throw in all the rest of us. We all need to participate in the economy directly. We all need the opportunity to build more economic security into our lives.

So how do we help?

The NY Times article talks about the remarkable availability of resources and tools for entrepreneurship. Barriers to entry are falling away on many fronts: marketing, financing, accounting, vendors, etc.

The article also drilled down to the most pressing issue for new startups. It will seem obvious when you see it in print, but it is painfully lacking too often in the world of entrepreneurship. That is, for any enterprise to be sustainable, it has to solve real problems.

New enterprises that solve real problems must be nurtured. We need their solutions. They need our help.

That's what my new energizing friends did for me at the presentation this week. They gave me a chance to talk about nurturing the smart ones. The green ones. The problem solvers.

Most important of all, they listened and then took action steps.

Steps that will lead to a local, independent, micro-loan fund dedicated to helping new and existing enterprises nurture and grow their smart, sustainable solutions. My friends didn't just listen, they began taking concrete steps to help their local economy and in many small ways, change the world.

The economy needs and wants new smart startups and growing small businesses. There is no shortage of entrepreneurs though there are plenty of barriers to the unleashing of that talent. It's the job of all of us to break down those barriers.

It couldn't have been more exciting to be among good people taking steps to enable talent and enterprise to flourish. That's how we help.



NY Times article. "Weary of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own", by Matt Richtel and Jenna Wortham Published March 13, 2009

Labels: entrepreneurship, funding, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement

My wife and business partner for decades, Mary, describes it as making the brochure on your way to the sales call.

While I counsel that entrepreneurship is a slow process, the day-to-day activity level can be breathtakingly fast. It can sometimes feel like you're leaning into a howling wind tunnel at a 45 degree angle and struggling to stay rooted to the ground. Making the brochure on the way to the sales call stuff.

I am working on an economic development project with a wonderful new friend, Mark, a farmer, entrepreneur, and regional legend who lives in Wyoming Township, Iowa County, Wisconsin. There is a link to Mark and his Renaissance Farm below.

Mark and I are working with others on a project to cite a vegetable processing and freezing facility in the Village of Highland, WI. Highland has many strategic assets from an economic development point of view, but more importantly for me personally, it is also the pie capitol of Wisconsin.

Our goal is to help build a business model that allows sustainable, regional agricultural producers to thrive. It is also to create a robust, nimble, and sustainable production system that is sufficiently scaled to make that happen.

Mark and I were talking about how to describe this yesterday as we traveled to meet an important new market partner. Organic is a legal term, and while we certainly want to process organic certified foods, there will also be a role for farmers meeting our new organization's goals of regional and sustainable.

Mark said 'what about calling this process regional fair trade'?

Lovely. Just right. The standards for fair trade are generally understood and acceptable. The idea of applying those standards to sustainable regional economic development make perfect sense.

Mark bet himself that I'd use the term 'regional fair trade' during the meeting we were traveling to. He won the bet. I had it out in our introductions. Mary would have smiled knowingly.

I like the term a lot because it lets me speak to economic development on an appropriate scale with the kind of passion I feel for the entrepreneurs and the wide range of stakeholders who want to support them.

We kicked around what a standard for regional fair trade might look like and, riffing off Wikipedia, think this may be a starting place for the discussion:

Regional fair trade is a market-based approach to empower producers and promote regional economic sustainability. The work advocates the payment of fair prices, communities of all kinds working together for the benefit of everyone in their region, and sustainable environmental standards.

Regional fair trade's strategic intent is to create sustainable information, production, and marketing systems that enable producers, consumers, businesses, institutions, and communities to work together to jointly grow regional economic self-sufficiency and security. Regional fair trade creates this environment through 'open source', transparent, reproducible economic development programs that support the region's people, their livelihoods, and their environment.

This idea is not meant in any way to diminish the goals and roles of global fair trade efforts. Those must be supported of course. This idea of regional fair trade honors that groundbreaking, world-changing approach and applies it to new geographies. Neither is excluded. Both are required.

Regional fair trade. Open source economic development. Time to make a brochure….


Mark Olson and Renaissance Farm

A great article about Mark Olson and Renaissance Farm

Village of Highland, Iowa County, Wisconsin

Town of Wyoming, Iowa County, Wisconsin

Labels: open source economic development, regional fair trade, slow money, The slow start up movement

My presentation to the Wisconsin Assembly's Committee on Rural Economic Development was really fun. Nervous, but fun.

I knew as the last of 4 speakers I'd be limited in time, so I had to focus on the three key action steps I most need as an economic developer working in rural communities.

For me it's a no-brainer. Good universal broadband, virtual incubators, and micro lending.

For this post I'd like to focus on micro lending. Specifically how a fast, inexpensive, off-the-shelf hybrid lending program might be put together quickly in local communities.

Thomas Friedman had a good piece in the New York Times last month about the use of capital in this awful economy. He focuses on the high tech economy, which is an obvious necessary component, but I believe this approach would benefit all levels of enterprise investment, perhaps especially micro lending. In an economy this bad, there are millions of people who might benefit from their own startup enterprise, sustainably run and seeded with micro investments, wisely overseen.

Here is Mr. Friedman: "Our country is still bursting with innovators looking for capital. So, let’s make sure all the losers clamoring for help don’t drown out the potential winners who could lift us out of this. Some of our best companies, such as Intel, were started in recessions, when necessity makes innovators even more inventive and risk-takers even more daring.

Yes, we have to shore up the banking system, which underpins everything; and finding a fair way to prevent hardworking people, who played by the rules, from losing their homes to foreclosure is both right and essential for stability.

But beyond that, let’s think, talk and plan in more aspirational ways. We’re down, but we’re not out…. Our motto should be, 'Start-ups, not bailouts: nurture the next Google, don’t nurse the old G.M.’s.'”

We are down, but we are not out. Exactly. That's a succinct call to action. Communities and economies will be rebuilt through new and better enterprises. A few will be Googles. The vast majority will be small businesses.

There are surely micro loan funds run by governments in North America that work, I just don't know any. I think that governments really want to do this, but it just requires too many activities that governments constitutionally can't do. They just can't get involved to the degree that's needed by the entrepreneur.

That's where you come in. Here's my hybrid idea.

A group of citizens want to improve their community. These communities can be neighborhoods, cities, counties, and regions. The community could also be virtual with members worldwide and everything in between.

Let's say the interested citizens want their community to go increasingly greener. Those citizens should vote with their money and establish their own green micro lending fund.

Banks are equipped to segregate the funds and create the loan coupon books specific to each loan, providing the institutional backbone with the tracking and recording components needed. They can create this for a modest fee if they can avoid the costs normally associated with loan origination (finding appropriate borrowers) and with loan collections, which can consume time and resources. Some loans will fail, many times because there is no insight and oversight afforded the borrower by the bank or government backer.

This is where you come in again.

As local citizens who want their community to go green, your group could be out in the community finding the entrepreneurs who are creating the kind of tomorrows you want.

Do not look for home runs here. That's a death strategy. Play small ball. Light a thousand candles stuff.

It's your money, shared with your friends and peers in your community, so it's unlikely you're going to publicly game the system to benefit cousin Bubba. There is a built in feedback loop that would keep our green citizens motivated to help find and create good, sustainable green entrepreneurs.

And your work continues…

You help present the case for your entrepreneur to your fellow green citizens or their green investment review committee. If approved, you have to help with mentorship and advice for that green entrepreneur while they grow their enterprise. If you can plug them into local resources like my office, all the better.

Self interest. Feedback loop 2.

The green entrepreneur succeeds. Your green fund gets their money back. Feedback loop 3.

Governments can't do this kind of personal mentorship. Banks can't easily locate and prepare efficiently organized, highly targeted new enterprises, let alone manage the supervision and collection issues associated with most small scale startups.

But you can't manage the loan coupon books the way the IRS requires either. Banks can. Easily and accurately. It's not good VS bad. It's who does what best.

I would strongly recommend people initially treat these targeted micro loan funds as though they were stock buying clubs without the stocks. If you want to formalize into a corporation or legal entity of some kind that's perfectly legitimate, but I'd like to focus on a looser model in this post. This latter route will absolutely require a lot more law and regulation than most situations need, but as the fund grows and as a more diverse group contributes, everyone will likely want a contractual way in and out of a more formalized and legally defined fund.

So, this could be your community green group. People chipping in risk money to make the vision of their green tomorrow happen. I'd suggest people put that money in as seed money and treat it as an investment in their communities, not as a way to make personal money.

This would be treated as a loan only. Requiring an ownership share would require that the receiving entrepreneur lawyer up to a degree that isn't productive at this stage.

Talk among yourselves about what the fund should have in place in advance for things like goals, returns (to cover bank fees), and potential rules to play in this sand box. Build out future conflict up front.

If it's like a simple stock buying club, the members voluntarily join for a common purpose, make their contribution to the pot, then add their expertise for trying to grow that pot. If their circumstances change or the goals of the group fractal, then contributors can take out their share of the non-invested pot at that moment and go play elsewhere.

Put the money into a segregated fund at the bank or credit union. For a modest fee, the financial institution will handle the official requirements and back-office mechanics, for which they are unbelievably well prepared to do. Your group and you do the messy, fun, non-bank entrepreneur stuff.

Here is where my day job comes into this. What's my dream tool for effective, nimble economic development?

I would have independent micro loan fund(s) available for specific purposes that were controlled by interested citizens, not governments.

If I knew the interests of those groups in advance, I can find, train and point appropriate entrepreneurs to them.

Beyond me, the entrepreneurs would get pre-loan vetting by interested, motivated individuals, fiscally legal processes, managed by committed people with some mentorship capabilities in place, and the most valuable of all resources, a network into the communities they hope to serve.

Like-minded people who want to change their communities in ways they and their friends want, should vote with their money. There is no more direct way I know to change and positively influence the future.

So, what would a targeted investor group like this look? Whatever you want it to look like.

I'd suggest for a neighborhood, it might be a group of people building up a fund of a few hundred dollars could help some local startup(s) improve their community. See what works and what doesn't.

If I think about this at a county level where I work, you'd have to pilot it to see what was manageable, but I'd think starting with $10,000 would be a reasonable start. You'd start with loans from $500 to say $2,000 to test it out, following the feedback loops described above. If it works and you can garner the contributions, move the fund to $50,000 and any good economic developer can get you dozens of startups tailored to the needs of that fund.

Nobody should expect home runs. This is small ball stuff. Day-in, day-out. One foot in front of the other. Repeat. This is how communities get built by choice not accident.

I scribbled down a quote from a guy on the radio I can't locate via online searching that went something like, 'our future is our choice, not our fate'.

We have a choice in this miserable economic environment to build the futures we want. Leave these decisions to others, and we will live in futures others choose for us.

Small, locally based, independent, member-run micro loan funds would be an unbelievably powerful tool for communities and the economic developers who serve them.

If you keep your expectations realistic and you keep the structure of the loan fund appropriately non-regulated, small groups of like-minded citizens can change the future of their communities.

Not by talking about it, but by making it happen with their money.

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, business plans, entrepreneurship, green tech, slow money, startups, The slow start up movement